The Economics of Identity and the Endogeneity of Race

Economic and social theorists have modeled race and ethnicity as a form of personal identity produced in recognition of the costliness of adopting and maintaining a specific identity. These models of racial and ethnic identity recognize that race and ethnicity is potentially endogenous because racial and ethnic identities are fluid. We look at the free African-American population in the mid-nineteenth century to investigate the costs and benefits of adopting alternative racial identities. We model the choice as an extensive-form game, where whites choose to accept or reject a separate mulatto identity and mixed race individuals then choose whether or not to adopt that mulatto identity. Adopting a mulatto identity generates pecuniary gains, but imposes psychic costs. Our empirical results imply that race is contextual and that there was a large pecuniary benefit to adopting a mixed-race identity.

Colorism and African American Wealth: Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century South

Black is not always black. Subtle distinctions in skin tone translate into significant differences in outcomes. Data on more than 15,000 households interviewed during the 1860 federal census exhibit sharp differences in wealth holdings between white, mulatto, and black households in the urban South. We document these differences, investigate the relationships between wealth and the recorded household characteristics, and decompose the wealth gaps into treatment and characteristic effects. In addition to higher wealth holdings of white households as compared to free African-Americans in general, there are distinct differences between both the characteristics of and wealth of free mulatto and black households, whether male- or female-headed. While black-headed households' mean predicted log wealth was only 20% of white-headed households', mulatto-headed households' was nearly 50% that of whites'. The difference between light- and dark-complexion is highly significant in semi-log wealth regressions. In the decomposition of this wealth differential, treatment effects play a large role in explaining the wealth gap between all subpopulation pairs.

Blending remote and local learning in the liberal arts

When designing a course offered during a small liberal arts college’s January Intersession, are there new ways to think about generating student demand? This may be particularly useful for courses with more-stringent pre-requisites satisfied by a limited number of students. Making connections to that small, passionate group can be particularly valuable but difficult to accomplish during the school year, and they may be particularly motivated by the opportunity to connect remotely. The course described in this presentation (Computational Simulation of Markets and Behavior) blended remote and on-campus access when it was offered during a three-week January 2016 session. Remote students participated in discussions during lecture and engaged in group work. They presented class projects to each other during their development, critiquing each other’s work and collaborating over the remote connections. Lecture incorporated conventional slides, whiteboard / blackboard, and iPad apps to deliver the content. Over the course’s compacted three week interim session, we began with all students connecting remotely and finished with all students local, with a mix of local and remote attendance during the middle week. Students and professor were able to successfully navigate the technological challenges for a valuable experience

Collaborative, Cross-Campus Hybrid Course Development and Implementation

Sponsored by Teagle Foundation, cohorts of faculty members collaborated across six Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania private liberal arts colleges to develop and implement instructional materials/modules and cross-campus courses using hybrid-learning approaches. In this panel, participating faculty from two of four pilot projects discuss their experiences with hybrid learning, cross-campus collaboration, and new pedagogical possibilities for traditional students in online arenas. Attendees will hear about two shared hybrid/blended courses (Media and Society/Media Literacy and Media Industries) dedicated to helping students understand media structures and power, ideological messages in media, and develop awareness of the centrality of media in a democracy to become critical media consumers and producers in society. These courses used a shared learning management system (Moodle) with joint classroom experiences that included interactive lectures, videos, and shared research projects, course reading responses, discussion forums, and online presentations and developed Media Literacy Week, a cross-campus event in Fall 2015 held jointly on two campuses. Attendees will also learn about another cross-campus collaboration featuring community-based learning and research (CBLR), beginning with a new quantitative research course in Fall 2015 and linking two marketing research courses in Spring 2016. Students explored issues in primary data collection, data cleaning, and research question development for CBLR projects in the first course and produced video tutorials on IRB and research methods for use in the later courses. Students in marketing research courses collaborated across campuses using video-conferencing technologies, Canvas, and Google to critique and edit the data collection and analysis experiences

Acting White or Acting Black: Mixed-Race Adolescents' Identity and Behavior

Although rates of interracial marriage are on the rise, we still know relatively little about the experiences of mixed-race adolescents. In this paper, we examine the identity and behavior of mixed-race (black and white) youth. We find that mixed-race youth adopt both types of behaviors -- those that can be empirically characterized as “black” and those that can be characterized as "white". When we combine both types of behavior, average mixed-race behavior is a combination that is neither white nor black, and the variance in mixed-race behavior is generally greater than the variance in behavior of monoracial adolescents, especially as compared to the black racial group. Adolescence is the time during which there is most pressure to establish an identity, and our results indicate that mixed-race youth are finding their own distinct identities, not necessarily "joining" either monoracial group, but in another sense joining both of them.

Collaborative, Cross-Campus Hybrid Course Development and Implementation

Sponsored by Teagle Foundation, cohorts of faculty members collaborated across six Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania private liberal arts colleges to develop and implement instructional materials/modules and cross-campus courses using hybrid-learning approaches. In this panel, participating faculty from two of four pilot projects discuss their experiences with hybrid learning, cross-campus collaboration, and new pedagogical possibilities for traditional students in online arenas. Attendees will hear about two shared hybrid/blended courses (Media and Society/Media Literacy and Media Industries) dedicated to helping students understand media structures and power, ideological messages in media, and develop awareness of the centrality of media in a democracy to become critical media consumers and producers in society. These courses used a shared learning management system (Moodle) with joint classroom experiences that included interactive lectures, videos, and shared research projects, course reading responses, discussion forums, and online presentations and developed Media Literacy Week, a cross-campus event in Fall 2015 held jointly on two campuses. Attendees will also learn about another cross-campus collaboration featuring community-based learning and research (CBLR), beginning with a new quantitative research course in Fall 2015 and linking two marketing research courses in Spring 2016. Students explored issues in primary data collection, data cleaning, and research question development for CBLR projects in the first course and produced video tutorials on IRB and research methods for use in the later courses. Students in marketing research courses collaborated across campuses using video-conferencing technologies, Canvas, and Google to critique and edit the data collection and analysis experiences

Interfirm competition, intrafirm cannibalisation and product exit in the market for computer hard disk drives

Intrafirm ?cannibalisation? of a product?s demand by the firm?s own products is found to have a more robust and significant relationship to the probability of its withdrawal than does interfirm competition from other firms? products